“Emotion resulting from a work of art is only of value when it is not obtained by sentimental blackmail.”
– Jean Cocteau
“The extreme limit of wisdom, that’s what the public calls madness.”
– Jean Cocteau
“The poet is a liar who always speaks the truth.”
– Jean Cocteau
“I am a lie who always speaks the truth.”
– Jean Cocteau
“I believe in luck: how else can you explain the success of those you dislike?”
– Jean Cocteau
“The reward of art is not fame or success but intoxication: that is why so many bad artists are unable to give it up.”
– Jean Cocteau
“We must believe in luck. For how else can we explain the success of those we don’t like?”
– Jean Cocteau
“The instinct of nearly all societies is to lock up anybody who is truly free. First, society begins by trying to beat you up. If this fails, they try to poison you. If this fails too, the finish by loading honors on your head.”
– Jean Cocteau
“I have a piece of great and sad news to tell you: I am dead.”
– Jean Cocteau
“Poetry is indispensable – if I only knew what for.”
– Jean Cocteau
“The poet doesn’t invent. He listens.”
– Jean Cocteau
“A true poet does not bother to be poetical. Nor does a nursery gardener scent his roses.”
– Jean Cocteau
“Children and lunatics cut the Gordian knot which the poet spends his life patiently trying to untie.”
– Jean Cocteau
“The poet is a liar who always speaks the truth.”
– Jean Cocteau
“I love cats because I enjoy my home and little by little, they become its visible soul.”
– Jean Cocteau
“All good music resembles something. Good music stirs by its mysterious resemblance to the objects and feelings which motivated it.”
– Jean Cocteau
“A film is a petrified fountain of thought.”
– Jean Cocteau
“Art is a marriage of the conscious and the unconscious.”
– Jean Cocteau
“I love cats because I enjoy my home and little by little, they become its visible soul.”
– Jean Cocteau
“I love cats because I enjoy my home and little by little, they become its visible soul.”
– Jean Cocteau
“All good music resembles something. Good music stirs by its mysterious resemblance to the objects and feelings which motivated it.”
– Jean Cocteau
“I have lost my seven best friends, which is to say God has had mercy on me seven times without realizing it. He lent a friendship, took it from me, sent me another.”
– Jean Cocteau
“The actual tragedies of life bear no relation to one’s preconceived ideas. In the event, one is always bewildered by their simplicity, their grandeur of design, and by that element of the bizarre which seems inherent in them.”
– Jean Cocteau
“Everything one does in life, even love, occurs in an express train racing toward death. To smoke opium is to get out of the train while it is still moving. It is to concern oneself with something other than life or death.”
– Jean Cocteau
“You’ve never seen death? Look in the mirror every day and you will see it like bees working in a glass hive.”
– Jean Cocteau
“After the writer’s death, reading his journal is like receiving a long letter.”
– Jean Cocteau
“The day of my birth, my death began its walk. It is walking toward me, without hurrying.”
– Jean Cocteau
“Here I am trying to live, or rather, I am trying to teach the death within me how to live.”
– Jean Cocteau
“Since the day of my birth, my death began its walk. It is walking toward me, without hurrying.”
– Jean Cocteau
“I have lost my seven best friends, which is to say God has had mercy on me seven times without realizing it. He lent a friendship, took it from me, sent me another.”
– Jean Cocteau